Toddlers are little learning machines. They have to be — everything is new to them. Watching my daughter learn to count or recognize colors has taught me something: patience. It turns out learning is not linear. Just because she counts correctly today doesn't mean that her crusade against the number 4 won't continue tomorrow.
As people of a certain age (whatever age you are now), we are NOT learning machines. When was the last time you actually had to learn something new? Why should we expect to nail skills after a lesson or reading an article when even the best learners need to try, fail, and try again?
One bridge skill that overlaps with toddler skills is counting. Counting in bridge is not as simple as 1, 2, 3. We need to count points, cards in suits, cards played, and more. There's too much to track for us to be reliable. It's amazing how complex it can be to count to 52. As a result, we need to simplify our counting.
In bridge, you will always see two hands. That means we can always figure out where the missing cards are in a suit if one of the players stops following suit. This is something we should do in every trump suit. Instead of saying, "We have eight trumps, let's count the others as we see them," we can say, "They have five trumps — is it 5-0, 4-1, or 3-2?"
This reconfiguring of our thinking will free us to count out more suits rather than trying to track every single card. One caveat: if someone ruffs, it's key to subtract that from their total. (This is one of the main reasons players erroneously draw an extra round of trumps.)
Counting splits is something you can and should practice away from the table. Force yourself to study these so that, when you're at the table, you don't have to work at it. You can just look at your hand and dummy and follow along with the play, so that you see a suit is, say, 5-3-2-?. Knowing the most common shapes — 4333, 4432, 4441, 5332, 5422, 6322, 6331, and so on — can help so that you don't even have to take the extra step of saying, "We see 9, how many are missing?"
The less we have to think about some of this mental infrastructure at the table, the more we will be able to think about other parts of the game (signals, declarer's plan, our plan).
When we talk about counting, players often picture the card sharp explaining where every single card will be. That's an admirable goal, but we certainly don't get there from here. We have to make stops along the way (and there will be bumps along the ride). First, start reliably counting the trump split. Then, work on counting the trump suit and one side suit you can potentially set up. Lastly, once you are comfortable counting your trump suit and one side suit, you can aim to count a third suit. If you can do that, you'll know the fourth automatically!
There are two types of counting we do at bridge: following-along counting and bridge counting. Following-along counting is the skill of paying attention to the cards as they go by (not as easy as it sounds, particularly after a rough night's sleep). Bridge counting is using all of our inferences: listening to the auction, thinking about the opening lead, watching signals. Using bridge counting to get a framework of the missing hands can make our following-along counting much easier.
Now that we've broken down counting, we need to work on each part before we can put them all back together. Don't be upset if you get it wrong the first time, or the tenth time. We don't learn instantly, but we can get there if we keep at it.